


Eat Us Alive

by albabutter



Series: Vagabonds [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Ableist Language, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Canon Disabled Character, F/M, Minor Character Death, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-09-18 00:33:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16984758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/albabutter/pseuds/albabutter
Summary: They skirted around Scranton and heard about Camp Jaha over in Allegheny. Some kind of group turned forest cult, and Bellamy had to literally pick her up to keep her from going. They had a message on loop, about a cure, and Clarke swore it was Wells’ father, but Bellamy gripped her face.“Clarke. Clarke, listen to me. That shit is not real. Best case scenario, it’s a group of harmless hippies out in the middle of the fucking forest. Worst case scenario, it’s a fucking murder cult. You were pre-med, Clarke. Do the math. What are the odds that they’ve already found a cure? And what are the fucking odds some dude, who may or may not be your friend’s dad, is holding on to that cure in the middle of a national park?”His hands were gentle on her face, but his eyes were wide with panic.“Don’t leave me, Clarke.”It was a turning point for them, and they didn’t turn back.





	Eat Us Alive

They don’t linger when Raven leaves. A noise comes out of Clarke’s mouth that might be a sob, but it comes out as a croak. Bellamy glances at her. He doesn’t say anything, but he does grab her by her backpack and drag her in for what might be generously called a hug. It’s hard to wrap your arms around someone when you’re both carrying assault rifles. Clarke still leans into it. Raven’s already disappeared over the ridge, but Clarke still peers after her. Bellamy nudges her forward.

“If anyone can make it on their own out here, it’s Raven. Believe me, she’s got a hell of a better chance out there then we do. At least where we’re heading.”

Clarke starts moving. “She’s never going to forgive me.”

“She’ll get over it,” Bellamy says, in his usual blunt way.

She still can’t help glancing over her shoulder one last time because Raven is the closest thing she has to a best friend – because whatever Bellamy is to her, it doesn’t fit neatly into any kind of box or label – and it hurts to lose Raven in any kind of way. For her to leave voluntarily digs in deep. Bellamy knocks her shoulder with his.

“Soon as we’re done here, we’ll go find her.”

She smiles at him, the one that says she knows he’s full of shit, and he returns it.

“Yeah, sounds good.”

✴

Clarke is passed out on a futon in some kid’s dorm when the world ends. She’d been bumming around Cambridge, talking Wells down from the Harvard mid-term edge, and avoiding her own struggling art portfolio in Providence when they got talked into drunken nerd trivia at MIT. She has a hangover and a blotchy hickey (thanks Finn), and the sound of her phone ringing is like nails on a chalkboard. She ignores the first two calls, but by the third one Wells has thrown a pillow at her, and she gives up. She answers and gets steamrolled immediately.

“Clarke, thank god. Where are you?”

“Dad, I’m fine. I’m with Wells,” and there’s a rant on the tip on her tongue, a justified monologue about how she’s twenty-two, not fifteen, and she doesn’t need a curfew, thanks, but her father keeps going.

“Clarke, listen to me. You need to leave. You have to get out of the city.”

“Wait, what?” Clarke’s head is pounding, and her mouth tastes like ass, and she’s seventy-two percent sure that this is some weird Jägermeister induced fever dream.

“They’ve shut down JFK, and soon they’ll be blocking the highways, setting quarantine. I need you to get to Logan airport. Can you do that?”

“Dad, what is going on? Quarantine what?”

Jake Griffin is not a man who scares easy, and the fear in his voice is enough to raise the hair on the back of Clarke’s neck. It’s enough to get her ass up and moving.

“There’s a virus, and it’s spreading fast, and you need to get yourself out.”

“Dad –“

“Get to Logan. Just get in the car and drive. Break every traffic law you need to. There’s a plane, terminal E. Just drive onto the tarmac.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Trust me, Clarke. They won’t even notice you. It’s small, ten passengers. Tell them who you are. Call me when you’re there. Can you do that? Clarke?”

Clarke swallows. “Yes. I can do it.”

“Good,” he says, and she can hear the relief in his voice. “I love you, Clarke.”

“I love you, too.”

“I know. Now go. Hurry.”

They don’t make it, and Clarke never forgets to be grateful that the last things they said to each other were scared but sentimental. The rest of the world doesn’t get that lucky.

It takes longer than it should to convince Wells that they need to get moving, but they get caught up in the science building of all things. New York gets torn apart on live tv before they can even make it out of the lobby. It’s a Sunday, and there are a couple dozen students who stand with them as they watch a tv reporter get ripped in half and eaten. Three people vomit in the room, and Wells grabs her hand. The news channels go dark, and the room is completely silent as fifty people look at each other.

_What do we do now?_

✴

They make decent time, and neither of them bothers to acknowledge how much quicker they can move without Raven. When night falls, Bellamy takes the first shift, and Clarke drops off like a rock. He nudges her when her four hours are up and takes his turn. There was a solid month in the beginning where Bellamy slept in twenty minute increments, never completely confident that Clarke, or anyone really, could have his back. She had to save his life twice before he’d even come close to giving himself four hours.

But Clarke can admit that losing two more people has made it even harder to relax enough to sleep. She has no idea how Raven is going to sleep at all. Even when they’re moving during the day, keeping an eye out is making her twitchy as hell.

“I’m getting a crick in my neck from turning around so much.”

It’s a testament to how much Clarke does not give a fuck about anything anymore since she mentions this to Bellamy while she’s taking a shit behind a crumpled up minivan. He’s on the other side of the car so at least they’re not making eye contact, but they’re both so blasé about it that it wouldn’t really phase her if they were.

“Tell me about it. I actually heard your neck crack when that bird flew by.”

She finishes her business and tosses the pack of wipes to him – that had been one of the first times they’d ever agreed on something: wet wipes were easy to carry, you could make do with one, and they kept everything from your ass to your knife wounds clean. It didn’t hurt when Bellamy had ranted about how the bubonic plague had come from England’s refusal to do anything about their “ _basic fucking hygiene”_ versus blaming it all on the rats or the fleas on the rats.

“I don’t like birds, Blake. They were annoying as fuck before all of this, and now they’re just fucking terrible. If I have to watch one eat someone’s eyeballs one more time, I swear to god, I’m going to break its neck with my bare hands.”

Bellamy just rolls his eyes and hands her back her gun. He flaps his hand at her and gestures for her to start walking again. They’re getting closer to the city proper--another six hours max. Before, whenever they started getting even remotely close to a city, they could hear the screams and gunshots from miles away. Now it’s just silence. They used to be able to smell the sulfur from the bombs and grenades and the smoke from the fires after, but now it’s just the smell of rotting flesh. Clarke used to wonder which one was worse, but after a certain point, her brain just shut down that train of thought. Either way, it didn’t matter; they both sucked.

It’s still fairly early in the morning, and even now, Clarke’s refused to become a morning person. Bellamy is more than familiar with her pre-noon asshole-self, so they walk in silence for most of the morning. They stick close to the trees on the side of the highways, only hopping back up to the road when the land drops off or they have to cross a river. Most of the cars have been broken into and picked over. They try to travel as light as possible, nothing but the essentials, so it hardly matters. They switch over to the side leading into the city when their side gets choked up. It’s not empty – there are plenty of cars where people jumped the median to try to move quicker, but it didn’t make a difference in the end. It’s still clearer by a long shot.

They start running into stragglers by the afternoon. Bellamy has what seems like two dozen knives strapped to his body, but they both stick to machetes. Monty had gotten his hands on a katana and had shouted racism when Miller threw it away and handed him a corn husker instead. Cutting off the head is the quickest way to take them down. Using a gun meant you had to have killer aim and plenty of time to get into the right spot at the right time. Two months into the whole ordeal, and it became apparent that you kept your guns out for the living.

They take turns picking off the dead, and Clarke starts inspecting them.

“These were turned a while ago, but they haven’t fed in a while either. They’re probably starving out.”

Bellamy nods. “You think it’s as simple as that? All the survivors just holing up and waiting for them to die out?”

Clarke turns one over with her boot. The head is a few feet away. It’s hard to tell who this used to be – stringy hair, gaunt face, hardly any teeth left. Pretty standard looking to be honest.

“When is anything ever that simple? There’s always a carrier. Viruses mutate; they’ll find a new host. Pathogens always do.”

That leads, like it always does, to the same conversation they’ve had about every couple of weeks.

“How far do you think it’s spread by now?”

Clarke shrugs. “Infected bodies are probably everywhere in North America. I’d be interested to see how the virus survives in different climates. Colder parts of Canada versus Death Valley. But overall, we’re done. Europe is probably on fire. Most of Asia just from sheer population. Probably the only places that even remotely have a chance are the islands. The ones out in the middle of nowhere. Iceland, Madagascar, Australia maybe.

He snorts. “If history has taught us anything, it’s that Australians and Russians can survive fucking anything.”

“You’re definitely right about Russia. All things considered, they’re probably doing just fine. I think planes started crashing cause there’d be infected on board. Wherever the planes crashed, it spread. But for Australia? Hawaii? Planes probably hit the water way before they reached the mainland. Can the virus survive the water? Will the fish eat the bodies and then the living eat the fish? No fucking clue. But do I think there are people around the world who survived? Absolutely.”

Bellamy skirts around a twisted heap of metal that might have been a truck at some point.

“I guess if I could a pick a place to be when the apocalypse happened, Australia would be as good as any. As a nation, they’re pretty chill. Just crack open a beer, sit back, and enjoy it while I can.”

“Hmm, yes, Australia. The Texas of Oceania.”

Bellamy laughs, loudly, and then looks surprised, like he forgot he can still do that. Clarke can’t help but feel smug.

“Personally, I think I’m going Carribean.”

Bellamy shakes his head. “Bad choice, Griffin.”

“What? Why?”

“Think about how many fucking cruise ships pass through there.”

She whistles. “Yikes, good point. How long before they completely devolved into cannibalism?”

“Those buffets can last three weeks, tops. No way they didn’t turn on each other before the end of the first month.”

“God, can you imagine being stuck out on one of those in the middle of the ocean?”

“Clarke, I wouldn’t go on one of those before the end of the world. So you sure are shit wouldn’t find me on one after.”

She raises an eyebrow. “You know that they have morgues on them, right?”

Bellamy actually stumbles a bit and stares at her.

“The fuck?”

Clarke nods. “Yeah, we used to go on a lot of cruises when I was little—“

“Oh man, I just love hearing stories about your upper middle class childhood, tell me more,” he grumbles.

“And this one time, a guy had a heart attack. My mom was the first doctor to reach him, but he passed away. I kept asking where his body went, if they threw him overboard or whatever, that she eventually just broke down and told me about the morgue. Apparently all the ships have them, just in case something like that happens.”

Clarke can’t keep the grin off her face, and the look of fascination and horror on his face makes it worth it.

“That is so fucking creepy. Convenient, but creepy.”

She shrugs. “Is what it is. Personally, I’d rather be thrown overboard, but I can see how that might be traumatic for the other passengers or whatever.”

“Fuck that, you’re dead. Go out in style. Viking funeral or bust.”

Clarke rolls her eyes. “Yes, I know, nerd. And if a boat is not available, then a flatbed is an acceptable substitute. Also, no human sacrifice or involuntary orgies. Voluntary and consensual orgies are acceptable as long as Octavia has been physically escorted away an acceptable distance – no fewer than three miles. Did I miss anything?”

There’s a look on Bellamy’s face that’s a little hard to read, but whatever it is, it makes her cheeks flare up something terrible.

He clears his throat. “You forgot the ale. Real ale. Not that fucking prison toilet wine Monty and Jasper make. I want the good shit. But other than that, you got it.”

They’re quiet for a few minutes.

“Any funeral requests?”

Clarke sticks her nose up in the air, every bit the haughty princess she was when they first met.

“Step one, avenge me. Step two bury me where the gods and the birds and the dead can’t find me. Step three, pour three fingers of whiskey, true whiskey, over my grave. Also, no orgies within five hundred feet. Funeral attire is black tie.”

Bellamy snorts and knocks her shoulder with is. “Whatever you want, Princess.”

Looking at him now, freckled and shaggy haired and smiling at her, it’s hard to remember that the first time they met, she almost clocked him in the face. Wells had to frog-march her to their side of the camp, and instead of looking scared, Bellamy had looked amused. She had glared at him.

_“You’re an asshole, Blake.”_

_“You’ll get over it, princess.”_

It’s even harder to remember that they spent the first three months of the apocalypse in a weird Ivy League commune of survival where according to the class rosters, they had some of the smartest people in the Western hemisphere running around. Engineering students trying to keep them on the grid for as long as possible, working on the structural integrity of what some asshole philosophy/religion double major had dubbed ‘the ark’. For a while, it felt like a goddamn camp experiment. Like all they had to do was tough it out in the woods and wait for the adults in the real world to take care of the very real problems. Clarke could scream just thinking about how goddamn naïve they were.

She looks at Bellamy again, and even though he’s still grinning and attractive as ever, he still looks like he’s aged five years. Clarke knows that she looks just as bad, if not worse. It just makes her wanna slap her past baby-faced self even harder.

_“Clarke, you’ve got to calm down.”_

_“Calm down? That asshole is trying to re-enact Lord of the fucking Flies while the world is falling apart. Do you have any idea how bad things are and how much worse they’re going to get?”_

_The look on Wells’ face says that he does know, but he wants to pretend he doesn’t._

_“There’s still hope, Clarke. The roads are blocked. They’ve got New York quarantined. Let’s see what happens.”_

What happens is that they watch a nuclear bomb get dropped on New York. Clarke stands on a rooftop with a hundred other people and sees the mushroom cloud and witnesses the complete obliteration of the world as they know it. It’s awe-inspiring, and Clarke can see it every time she blinks. They stand in complete silence for the longest ten minutes of her life. Hundreds of people in complete, awed silence. When it breaks, the world turns ugly. The wails turn into screams turn into mass fucking panic. No one knows what to do or where to go but no one can stay still. Two people get pushed off the roof. Four more get trampled by the crowds, and Clarke spends the rest of the night watching people tear themselves apart, and she wonders for the first time, but not the last, if it would have been kinder for them to be nuked as well.

✴

They break at the city limits and pull out a pack of beef jerky and the map that’s become their lifeline. It’s a beat-up thing, dog eared and covered in notes and calculations. They spread it out over the hood of a car and pour over it.

By the time they’d left the ark, most of the eastern seaboard had gone dark. Getting through upstate New York had been a goddamn nightmare. Raven had done the calculations for the nuclear fall-out, and Clarke should have known that her math was solid. But blame it on terror or anger or fucking Finn infused insanity, she’d insisted they add an even bigger buffer in their path. They cut over too far north, too close to Albany, and they lost half their group there. Wells took a bite meant for her, Raven got shot, Clarke doctored up, and Murphy got tossed out on his ass.

They skirted around Scranton and heard about Camp Jaha over in Allegheny. Some kind of group turned forest cult, and Bellamy had to literally pick her up to keep her from going. They had a message on loop, about a cure, and Clarke swore it was Wells’ father, but Bellamy gripped her face.

“ _Clarke. Clarke, listen to me. That shit is not real. Best case scenario, it’s a group of harmless hippies out in the middle of the fucking forest. Worst case scenario, it’s a fucking murder cult. You were pre-med, Clarke. Do the math. What are the odds that they’ve already found a cure? And what are the fucking odds some dude, who may or may not be your friend’s dad, is holding on to that cure in the middle of a national park?”_

His hands were gentle on her face, but his eyes were wide with panic.

_“Don’t leave me, Clarke.”_

It was a turning point for them, and they didn’t turn back.

Looking at the map, Clarke knows that this is another make it or break it moment for them.

Abby or Octavia.

Abby, who for reasons Clarke still doesn’t fucking know, is ensconced in the fucking pentagon.

Octavia, who should have been at her internship in Cambridge, but instead spent the weekend with her marine boyfriend at Henderson and inadvertently gave her brother a heart attack.

They had been traveling on the assumption that Octavia was still alive because there was no other option for Bellamy. So, it’s not even a question for him. Or rather, Clarke isn’t stupid or masochistic enough to try to make it one. It’s a question for herself, and it’s time for an answer.

Bellamy keeps his distance as she scans the map, fingers smoothing out the wrinkles. He’s waiting and very deliberately avoiding her eyes. He doesn’t need to.

“So, how do you want to handle this? Car or foot?”

Bellamy looks a little surprised, and she shrugs it off. It comes down to odds for her. Out of all the parties involved, Abby currently has the highest chances of still being alive. Octavia has decent odds based on the military factor. But the odds of Bellamy making it to her in one piece are drastically lowered if Clarke doesn’t go with him, and vice versa. She can’t tell if his surprise is that she’d chose someone over her family or if it’s her choosing him specifically. Clarke doesn’t know Octavia, and she barely knows her mother anymore, but she knows Bellamy, and she’ll follow him to hell itself if it means keeping his stupid ass alive. She doesn’t say that though; he’d never let her live it down.

“The streets are going to be beyond ruined. No point with a car since we don’t have to tools to arm it.”

Clarke nods. “Alright, let’s go.”

Stragglers are easier to hear with all of the glass and trash on the ground, but they both know that the biggest threats at this point are other groups of survivors. Moving through the city is uncomfortable and nerve-wracking. Their speed is choppy, hindered by the need to stay quiet and out of sight, ducking behind cars and peeking around corners. The undead still wander around, drastically fewer compared to the beginning, but there are enough to warrant extreme caution. Clarke takes the lead, with Bellamy sighting the buildings around them, eagle eye ready for a homebred sniper. They were officially reaching the next stage of the apocalypse.

_“Outbreak, epidemic, breakdown, survive, scavenge, and if we’re really fucking lucky, rebuild.”_

_“So, which part are we in?”_

_“I think we’re still in breakdown.”_

_“How the actual fuck is that even possible? What’s left to break?”_

_“There’s still hope. People are still waiting for help or a way out or a cure. We’re still pretending that this is a fixable thing. Like if we just hold out long enough, we’ll be fine.”_

_“Who says we won’t?”_

_“When you stop asking that question, that’s when the breakdown is over.”_

Miller had been brutal, and Jasper had looked devastated. But Finn had fought it, and Clarke tried to stay positive. It didn’t last long.

They had moved to the survive portion of the ‘end of times’ scale when Monty and Miller and the rest of the ragtag crew decided they weren’t going anywhere near DC. There’s a half-promise to meet-up in West Virginia when they’re done miraculously rescuing her mom and Octavia. It’s such a bizarrely unrealistic but hopeful idea, and it makes it a hell of a lot easier to keep pushing through the city instead of eating her gun. But Clarke has a much better understanding of Miller’s timeline. They had survived collectively, but now hunger and need had driven everyone out of their hidey holes and into the ruins to grab anything and everything left. Desperation and fear are powerful motivators, and people got really trigger happy really quickly. Indra’s group had been proof of that.

They haven’t encountered any living people yet, and Clarke is a little surprised but not optimistic. She cuts the head off of a six year old and tries to stay closer to what’s left of building walls. Most of the undead are falling apart, eyesight deteriorating, noses just straight up falling off, the cartilage eaten away, but the ears still worked, and it only took one semi-functioning zombie to alert the rest and start a swarm. They spend a good chunk of the time waiting for groups to amble past, attracted by the shrieks of the stragglers Clarke and Bellamy strike down. The strategy is to stick close to the Potomac and ignore the carnage on the banks. There are no signs of people or activity and that really should have tipped them off.

“Clarke-”

He’s down before she can fully turn, a dart sticking out of his shoulder. There’s a sharp pinch and a dart in her neck before she can even reach for him. The last thing she sees is a blurry, camoed soldier who is well fed and well rested and completely unsurprised by her or Bellamy.

_Son of a bitch._

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I live in America, and in America, they don't teach us geography so if you're from the eastern seaboard, just ignore my geographical bullshit. The Raven/Murphy (prequel? companion piece?) is part one if you're into niche fic.


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